self-critical - Story 127783 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The virtual tour felt like a betrayal. Amelia, staring at the screen, fought the urge to smash her laptop. The pristine kitchen, with its granite countertops, bore no resemblance to the cramped, chaotic space she’d grown up in.

It triggered something within her, an old, familiar ache. She was always the one who made mistakes, who ruined things. She’d messed up in the kitchen, too, as a child, setting a dish ablaze one time. Now, this kitchen mocked her.

She slammed the laptop shut, the metallic clang echoing in the silent apartment. Why couldn’t she ever get it right?

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion self-critical. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 self-critical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the self-critical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280